


Embers

by chronicAngel



Series: Avatar College AU [2]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Backstory, College AU, Fire, Gen, Modern AU, POV Third Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-07
Updated: 2016-11-07
Packaged: 2018-08-28 07:05:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8436106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chronicAngel/pseuds/chronicAngel
Summary: They will never forget.





	

She doesn't remember how the fire started anymore. She remembers her brother and her father cooking dinner, vaguely, but she also remembers playing with Sokka in the snow outside. She remembers that her mother was at work when it started. She remembers that the snow and ashes mixed together in the air, and she couldn't tell the difference between burning hot ash and stinging cold snowflakes as they fell.

Her father had come running out to the back to collect her, and she remembers the way Sokka looked at her, like he was trying to soak her in via osmosis to get her out faster. A piece of wood that was supporting the awning over their porch was set ablaze by a few pieces of fire that had danced out the window in just the right place at just the right time, and her eyes were wide as she stared at the white paint peel itself away from the beam as the fire consumed it. When she was even younger than she was then, she and her brother used to pretend that the embers and sparks from a fire were tiny fire fairies, born from the wood and drifting away to go to wherever their home was. It was hard to play pretend this time.

She remembers her father yelling at her and her brother to run out to the front yard, telling them that he would take care of this, but she was stuck, frozen in place and staring as their house burned down and Sokka, only a little bit bigger than her, tried to tug her away from the house. He grabbed her arm and pulled so hard that looking back on it, she's surprised he didn't pull her shoulder right out of its socket. It took ten minutes for her eyes to finally snap away from the flames, and Sokka was half-carrying her in the attempt to take her away from their house, tears from his eyes dripping onto her face as he tripped and fell into the snow. She remembers pushing her tiny body up and helping him onto his feet before the two of them sprinted, hand-in-hand, toward the gate, and Sokka was only barely tall enough to open it so they could get into the front, the gloves on his hands blocking the scorching metal from burning his skin. Their father didn't emerge into the front for another twenty minutes, scratches and burns decorating his face but for the most part no major damage done; he hadn't put out the fire, but he was more concerned with making sure his children were safe.

She can't remember another time she's ever seen Sokka cry, not before then and not after, but she distinctly remembers the tears streaming down his face as he clung to her outside their childhood home which was burning to the ground. She remembers the feeling of the tears falling onto her face and into her hair, mixing with her own tears until she couldn't tell the difference anymore. It felt like they had been standing there like that for hours before their mother got home, but she knows it likely wasn't even one. Every time she looked up from his shoulder, her face was promptly returned to its original position, and she stood there hugging her brother until their mother got home and she didn't pay any attention to the fact that they were perfectly hidden by the barren spruce tree in their front yard. Neither of them ran to meet her like normal because they were so shaken with making sure that they were actually safe, and it took her a minute to notice the condition of their house but once she did her eyes went wide and she ran to meet their father in the door way. Katara can't remember the onslaught of questions that she asked him anymore.

"Hakoda, I have to get the kids!" Those were the last words Katara ever heard her mother say. Her father didn't get the opportunity to say that they were already out and safe before she had torn herself away from him and run into the house, coughing and hacking as smoke burned her throat and lungs so loudly that Katara and Sokka could hear her choking from outside.

She remembers peeling her body away from her brother's and hesitantly tiptoeing on numb feet toward their porch, which hadn't yet caught fire and was currently where their father was standing, his cries of their mom's name mixing with her calls for her children. Sokka stood trembling, barely visible from where she stood as he hid behind the trunk of the tree and stared, wide-eyed and hopeful, waiting for the return of their mother, but they never saw her come out of the house. Her little hand reached up and grabbed her father's, and he jumped, before picking her up in his arms and carrying her away from their house and to his son, picking him up to and running to the neighbor's house, but it was at least a half a mile to their neighbor's home and by then there was no hope of saving it. The smoke was still visible as they moved away, and she remembers staring out the window at the black, puffy cloud in the sky as her father talked on the phone with the fire department.

It had taken two hours for them to get to their location, and mere seconds to get to their house after that. The fire had consumed most of their home now, leaving it a crumbled ruin with smoke and ashes, the fire in small patches as opposed to one roaring, collective flame like it had been before. Katara watched the firemen put out the small fires that were left, and she felt like she was watching herself walk forward. She wasn't in control of her legs, instead some force was pushing her to go inside what was left of their little home and she was just watching her body move, watching herself navigate the scorched halls until she made it to what used to be her bedroom.

The scream that escaped her throat was her. The collapsing onto her knees was her. The pulling at her mom's hand was her. She didn't know what possessed her to go to the room, but it was her who was in it. Her bed was blackened, the mattress having large holes where scorched stuffing and springs peeked out, and the blanket which had the image of a little girl and a snowman embroidered on it was burned past the point of recognition; a stuffed penguin laid on its side on the floor next to the bed, one of the flippers completely burned off, and the pictures of herself and Sokka, and herself and her mom, and their whole little family were all lost, but she was able to ignore it all because of the body of her mother laying in the middle of her blackened floor.

There was no blood. Her mother's body was dry, excepting the small amounts of pus and whatever other fluids she couldn't identify that coated the burns on her arms and chest and still-recognizable, still-beautiful face. The room was still mostly filled with smoke, and she choked on screams and coughed out sobs until everyone was in her room and staring in horror at her or at the body in front of her like she might have died with her mother. Sokka ran to her at the same time as their father ran to their mother's corpse and she sobbed into her brother's arms as their dad sobbed into their mom's hair, and she could hear in his breathing that Sokka was trying to be the strong one, trying so hard not to cry, and she wanted to tell him it was alright but she couldn't breathe to let the words out.

She heard her father whispering "Kya" over and over again, for the next few minutes until they were pulled out of the room and the firemen picked up her body and called an ambulance, for the next few days when he thought she couldn't see him crying, and a few weeks later at the funeral. They had had to wait three weeks to go to her funeral, a tiny ceremony with people she did and didn't recognize. She stayed behind Sokka, who stayed behind Gran Gran, who was thankfully strong enough for the three of them and thus didn't need to hide as people came and talked to her about their memories of Kya. Their father gave a speech, but she doesn't remember the words to it anymore; their grandmother gave a speech but she didn't even understand the words then; their various aunts and uncles that she didn't even know they had gave speeches and there came a time when people started asking her and Sokka, the brave children who were doing so well in the face of this tragedy, what they remembered about their mom, as if she had died years and years ago, as if they could _ever_ forget their _mom._ Sokka talked more than she did. He talked about lullabies and fishing and falling asleep with his sister and mom on the couch after a movie. She talked about braiding, but then she decided that was stupid and she stopped talking. People called her shy.

The three of them moved in with their Gran Gran after that, and their father had to leave them alone for months at a time because of his military work, so she and Sokka learned to take care of themselves-- to take care of each other.

It has been almost ten years since then and she still has a small shrine to her mother on her dresser, with incense and one of the few pictures of her that survived the fire. She knows Sokka keeps a picture of her in his dorm, too, though his is more discrete.

When she wakes up in the morning, she says hello to the picture, lights the incense, and says a prayer to gods she no longer believes in, just in case they are listening, as if she can somehow keep her mother safe beyond the grave. She grabs her backpack and shoves her textbooks and notebooks and folders into it and slings it over her shoulder, then blows a kiss to her mother's picture, hugs Gran Gran, and runs out the door to catch the bus so she isn't late.


End file.
